@julian
I should have tried associating by email address
I tried it just now and it works

thanks and great job on NodeBB

Is there a way to create a link that will chat directly to a specific user?
something like
https://forum.mydomain.com/<me>/chats/<myfriends>

I want to integrate chat with my application, and one of them is to allow user to chat by clicking a link

thanks

In the session sharing admin screen, there is option "Don't automatically create NodeBB accounts for unrecognized users", which has this as description "By default, an unrecognized user id found in a payload cookie will have a local NodeBB account automatically created for it. If enabled, that cookie will not resolve into a session and that client will remain a guest."
I assumed there is a case where there is a recognizable user id that can be used by session sharing to associate to existing nodebb account. Is there a way to create (via write API?) nodeBB account that can be used by session sharing?

As far as I know, session sharing uses "unique id" (passed in to JWT token as "id") to find existing user created via session sharing

My question is, what's the right way to pre-create nodeBB account to be used by session sharing?

I've tried using write API, but session-sharing create a new account instead of using the one created by write API
I've tried to open connection to https://forum.myaccount.com (using java's urlConnection) and send cookie, but it doesn't work - I think I need to go to specific URL for this to work

Can you please help me?

thanks